CALL FOR PAPERS:

"The Limits of Community"?--Bourgeois and Middle-Class Modernism in
German Architecture from c.1900 to 1940

Session at the 61st annual meeting of the Society of Architectural
Historians (SAH), Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, April 23-27, 2008
(www.sah.org)

As is confirmed in countless declamatory manifestos, the form of
social organization favored by the architectural avant-garde in the
early twentieth century was the particular and unique community
rather than that of the broader, capitalist society.
The historiography of twentieth-century architecture,
particularly in the German context, has followed this path by
theorizing notions of community, rather than researching the complex
interrelations of developer, architect, and city planner. As a
result, we know in great detail the workings of the agonist,
avant-garde group that built next to nothing, but very little about
the mainstream commercial practices that built the banks, offices,
shops, factories, and bourgeois housing that composed 95% of the
building stock of a city like Berlin.
Already during the 1920s this one-sided fascination with
"community" was criticized. For example, the philosopher Helmuth
Plessner vigorously affirmed "society" in the book The Limits of
Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism (1924) as the appropriate
realm of human interaction based on formal adherence to social
conventions. Moreover, Plessner declared the creation and defense of
society to be a specific concern of the middle classes and the
bourgeoisie. This argument offers a useful viewpoint from which to
analyze anew the contributions of the middle classes to the
architectural culture of Germany in the first half of the twentieth
century. Both middle-class architects and clients argued for the
individual as the acting agent in modern society. Moreover, bourgeois
domestic architecture affirmed the modern metropolis as an adequate
space of and for modern society.
This session invites papers that deal with commercial and
residential architecture, which reflects an affirmative view of
capitalist society, the architects and clients who produced it, and
contemporary theoretical discussions that are relevant to the
analysis of German modern architecture in the early twentieth
century.

Please send abstracts to:

Prof. Volker M. Welter, University
of California at Santa Barbara, Arts 1234, Santa Barbara, CA
93106-7080, telephone: +1-805-893-5875, fax: +1-805-893-7117, e-mail:
welterarthistory.ucsb.edu;
or to
Prof. Iain Boyd Whyte, Architecture, University of Edinburgh,
School of Arts, Culture and Environment, 20 Chambers Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1JZ, Scotland, United Kingdom, telephone:
+44-131-650-2322, facsimile: +44-131-650 8019, email:
i.b.whyteed.ed.ac.uk

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